December 2nd, 2006

TinyURL.com: the next YouTube?

Posted by Dan Farber @ 6:29 pm

Categories: General, IT Matters, Web Technology

Tags:

David has a podcast about TinyURL.com at his new ZDNet blog, David Berlind's Testbed. He say he's not crazy in suggesting the TinyURL.com could be the next YouTube. "TinyURL.com is a dream come true for the Madison avenue types whose Holy Grail has always been how to serve people with an advertisement at their moment of greatest need," he writes. David calls TinyURL.com "a demand intercepting weapon," and posits that the little company should be worth a lot of money. He interviews TinyURL.com developer Kevin "Gilby" Gilbertson.

November 6th, 2006

Podcast: Majority of Startup Campers give "unconference" format a thumbs up

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:37 pm

Categories: General, IT Matters, Podcasts, Startup Camp

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In addition to finding out why attendees were attending Startup Camp and whether or not they were getting anything out of it, ZDNet podcaster James Hilliard also checked in on their satisfaction with the unconference format. Like Mashup Camp, Startup Camp is an unconference that's largely based on the idea that:

• the most interesting content at a typical conference happens during the coffee breaks and after hours gatherings
• when presentations are being given to an audience that there's probably one or more people in the audience that know as much or more than the presneter(s) and that could be making a valuable contribution to the session (turning it into a conversation rather than a presentation)
• unlike with conferences where the agenda and speakers are often determined 6 months to a year in advance, ad-hoc agenda planning on the day of the conference assures the timeliness and relevance of the content to the attendees.

Also, like Mashup Camp, Startup Camp is largely based on Harrison Owen's Open Space methodology with a few little twists tossed in. For example, to keep the energy level high, particularly after lunch, we do something called SpeedGeeking which is a lot like speed dating except for the fact that the people who stay put (in their seats) during each round have 5 minutes to tell those circulating to each table why they should win the Best Startup award (or, in the case of Mashup Camp, the Best Mashup Award). Inspired by the old chili-cookoffs at Comdex, each attendee is given one wooden nickel to cast their vote with (after or during SpeedGeeking, they give it to the best startup, in their mind). 

James' podcast can be streamed or downloaded to your system using the Flash-based player above. Or, if you're subscribed to ZDNet's IT Matters series of podcasts, it will be downloaded to your PC and/or portable audio player depending on how you have them configured.  Here's what attendees had to say (and the time code at the point which they said it):

0:48 Interviewee 1: I like the idea of having a community-based agenda. You vote on the topics you want to discuss.. I think that is a good idea.  And the free perks are the coffee and the food? that doesn't hurt either.1:02 I just love the basics of the unconference because you have to participate. You just can't sleep like in the others (conferences) 1:12 It's great getting out of the controlled environment where you have a committe choosing all the sessions. It's great to be a part of choosing the sessions.

1:27 Interviewee 2: I think this is my fourth unconference. Or fifth unconference. And I think that when you pick your session right, they're great and the rules work really well because you can vote with your feet. That means you get to walk away when you're not getting something from something. So, you get to make of it what you will and the discusssions are vibrant and interesting and fun sometimes and controversial so I enjoy them. Yeah, I'd absolutely do it again.

1:51 Interviewee 3: It encourages you to be rude to people: to go away when you don't want to talk to somebody and talk to somebody else and it's actually OK to do that.

2:12 Interviewee 4: Actually, the speedgeeking part of the event is really interesting because you can see a lot of  different experiences. You can see different stages of the companies from the idea to companies more developed right now which is interesting.

2:30 Interviewee 5: I like — what is this called? "Fast Geeking?" Speedgeeking — I like it. I can see myself as one of the persons who sitting at a table next time. I can express or talk about my company to everybody and I can get focused because it is only five or six people in a group [to which I'm presenting]. So, definitely, it's a good format. Definitely something I'm interested in.

3:02 Interviewee 6: I've been to several [unconferences]. It's a great way to be able to communicate with people. It's much more effective for me than a structured conference.

3:13 Interviewee 7: Actually, it's not too different than a regular conference except for the unstructured nature of it meaning that a lot of it is sort of more day-of planning and you have to adapt and adjust. It's kind of like being an entrepreneur in a lot of ways and I think it actually creates a little bit more energy.  A little more excitement.

3:28 Interviewee 8: I would come back. If I have any complaints, it's maybe that it's a little too unstructured. I don't really know. But, it becomes a little hard to figure out what's going on  at any time because everybody is sort of winging it.

3:42 Interviewee 9: I like how there's no structure. It makes it easier to network with people because you kind of drift towards the people that are doing the same thing you're doing. So it's very nice.  

November 6th, 2006

Podcast: Startup Campers say why they came and what happened

Posted by David Berlind @ 2:52 pm

Categories: General, IT Matters, Startup Camp

Tags:

ZDNet podcaster James Hilliard showed up at Startup Camp last week with a recorder and a microphone and made the rounds amongst attendees to find out why they attended and what, if anything, they got out of the unconference.  Whereas one attendee was looking to be right in the heart of Silicon Valley's buzz, others (including an angel round investor that James interviewed) had their checkbooks out. One guy from France talked about how he's helping companies back home get some traction in Silicon Valley while still another spoke of hoping to get the next Yahoo or Google to use his technology.

In terms of whether it was a success for those in attendance and if they got what they came for, the answers seemed to indicate that there was something for everyone and no one left disappointed (at least no one of those interviewed by James). 

The 2:14 podcast can be streamed or downloaded to your system using the flash player above. Or, if you're subscribed to ZDNet's IT Matters series of podcasts, it will appear on your system and/or your portable audio player (depending on how you have it configured) automatically.

October 12th, 2006

Podcast: Is Carr right? Does IT not matter? Gartner attendees respond

Posted by David Berlind @ 10:49 am

Categories: Gartner Symposium, General, IT Management, IT Matters, Podcasts

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For those of you who haven't heard of Nicholas Carr, he's the guy who, back in 2003 (gosh, has it been that long?) published an essay in Harvard Business Review with the title IT Doesn't Matter. There are only a handful of people under a handful of brands that could publish an article of that nature and get the attention that his article got. Carr is one of those people and Havard is one of those brands. A lot of people, particularly those in IT circles, were offended by Carr's insinuation that IT couldn't drive competitive advantage. As we say in the news business, it's one of those stories that just keeps on giving. And so does Carr. Last week, Carr was apparently in London reiterating how IT does not matter.  Reported Will Sturgeon from Silicon.com (a sister organization to ZDNet under the CNET Networks umbrella):

Nicholas Carr, a perennial thorn in the side of the IT industry and author of the 2003 Harvard Business Review article "IT doesn't matter," looks set on stirring fresh controversy in the industry, telling companies to stop spending on technology….Last week, Carr told an audience in London that companies have been misled to believe buying technology can make them more productive….He said: "Smaller firms are more productive than large firms and yet they have less technology." And though he conceded it would be naïve to assume that represents the grounds for a hard and fast rule, he added it should at least "lead anybody to question the importance of IT."….He added: "The vast majority of companies should be IT followers not IT leaders. The innovator is going to pay a lot more than those who follow in the innovator's wake."

So, since I was in the proverbial lion's den of IT professionals this week (Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo), I thought I'd sieze the opportunity to run what Carr has been saying by a few CIO types and catch what they had to say on tape.  And that's exactly what I did. For about an hour yesterday morning, I stood around the most highly trafficked area at the Dolphin Hotel in Lake Buena Vista, Florida (the main site of the Gartner event) and stopped a bunch of attendees as they attempted to run away from me with my microphone in plain sight. For those that agreed to stop, I read some excerpts from Sturgeon's article and asked them to respond. 

I managed to catch some incredibly insightful responses on tape. Others were inciteful (sic). Bob (the first interviewee) found Carr's opinion to be foolish. Ron, who never heard of Carr, said "the man that is prophesizing that is absolutely stupid." But some IT professionals agreed with Carr. Clarence for example compared early technology adopters to the famous explorers Lewis & Clark. In other words, trying to use new technology to generate competitive advantage is risky and, at best, is for relatively few companies. Let Lewis & Clark pave the way (so to say) and then follow in their path. Since first starting the IT Matters series of podcasts almost two years ago, this is probably one of my favorite shows because of how many people I interviewed and how many points of view they brought to the table. One interviewee — Susan — told me of how IT most definitely matters, but in a way that's probably consistent with Carr's thinking. Another positioned IT as a basic utility that all businesses need, like water and electricity (again, consistent with Carr's thinking if you ask me). 

You can stream the podcast audio to your desktop or notebook or manually download the MP3 to your system by using the embedded player above. Or, if you're subscribed to ZDNet's IT Matters series of podcasts, it should appear on your system and/or portable audio player automatically.

October 9th, 2006

Podcast: Gartner attendee #1625 seeks paperless office, security, and Vista

Posted by David Berlind @ 4:33 am

Categories: Gartner Symposium, General, Government, IT Matters, Podcasts, Software Infrastructure

Tags:

Just prior to things getting kicked off here at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, I thought I'd rope in some attendees to find out what was on their minds this year and what they were hoping to come away from the conference with.  The first person I found who was willing to talk was Carl. Carl is an internal auditor with a state agency and I found him near the Symposium/ITxpo registration area at the Dolphin Hotel on the "Disney campus" (the main site of the event).

I recorded my interview with Carl. You can hear the interview by using the embedded player above to stream it to your desktop, manually download it, or, if you're subscribed to ZDNet's IT Matters series of broadcasts, it should appear on your PC and/or your portable audio player automatically. 

This is Carl's second year attending the event.  He came back because he thinks it's one of the best events he's ever been too. In particular Carl is looking for document management solutions that reduce the amount of hard copy that his agency keeps on hand:

We're looking to go to a paperless office environment… more or less because we generate probably 30,000 or 40,000 pages a month….They just pretty much get printed out an dgo in a file cabinet…most of it comes out of an accounting system we use..we just print it as we need it or on the fly everyday and that gets stored pretty much in file cabinets, we have quite a few of them.

According to Carl, the accounting system that his agency currently uses has the ability to generate documents in electronic format such as Adobe Acrobat, Excel and Word. So, whatever solution they find, it will need to accomodate the flow of information from the accounting system directly into the document management system.

With all the recent breaches in personal data, many of them due to laptop theft or loss, Carl's agency is also deeply sensitized to data security now that more and more people workers are moving to notebooks:

I'm also looking at information security.  we're  switching to more laptops in our office. So, we're looking at some of the network access control, encryption, web filtering, things like that. 

Carl recounted how, between he and his wife, his family has received a total of 5 notifications that their own personal data has someone been compromised.  One was from a hospital that discovered its systems had been hacked for over six months.

Carl is also looking for demonstrations of Vista. I asked Carl what his main areas of concern were. The first thing he mentioned was how it's going to work with older hardware and drivers. But Carl is also apparently fed up with getting weekly security patches. He says he'll wait 6 months to a year before seriously considering any upgrades to Vista.  Carl also notes that the desktops at his agency are very firmly locked down. Users cannot load their own software on them or modify them in anyway.  Not only that, while he thinks Vista looks pretty slick, he just sees that as window dressing ("bells and whistles" according to him). It's what's under the hood that counts and unless Vista corrects the security situation with XP, it doesn't sound like Carl's interest in moving to Vista will be piqued any time soon.

October 3rd, 2006

del.icio.us founder (and MIT top innovator) Joshua Schachter Unplugged

Posted by David Berlind @ 1:33 pm

Categories: Emergetech, General, IT Matters, Personal Technology, Podcasts, Web Technology

Tags:

Most people don't know who Joshua Schachter is. But as of recently, when the popular social bookmarking service he invented (known as del.icio.us) gained its 1,000,000th registered user, there are clearly plenty of Internet users who are familiar with his handiwork. In December 2005, del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo and last week, out of a field of 35 innovators all aged 35 and under, MIT's Technology Review Magazine named Schachter its top innovator of the year. While I was at the conference, I had an opportunity to catch up with Schachter to find out more about him, his (or should I say Yahoo's) del.icio.us service, and what he's doing now that he is a Yahoo employee. 

Using the embedded player above, the audio interview can be streamed to your desktop, manually downloaded, or if you are subscribed to ZDNet's IT Matters series of podcasts, it should turn up automatically on your computer and/or your portable audio player (iPod, iRiver, etc.).  Here are a few of the highlights of the interview.

Schachter on what he's doing at Yahoo:  I still am the general manager for delicious….working to figure out what the future of search is and how these things all tie together and what the big picture looks like.

Schachter on what the future of search is: [We're going to go from a world where] machines are telling you what's important and searching information [to a world where] we're actually going to be able search the knowledge of other people and get access to other people's opinions and thoughts and so on in a much more direct manner.

Schachter on Yahoo's selection of Internet Explorer 7 to front-end some of it's services (see the news):  So long as we justify what we do, we have free reign to do what is the right thing for the product and for the users.  A lot of users use Firefox so we (del.icio.us) support that as well as Internet Explorer. We are always looking to do the right thing.. not necessarily building something that fits a particular political profile. We're always looking to build the thing that is the right thing for the user.

Schachter on whether "Do the right thing" is Yahoo's version of Google's "Do no evil": Perhaps. It is a difficult dance to figure out exactly what the right thing for everybody [is]. I like to think that we always try to do the right thing.

Schachter on whether delicious will ever be monetized (it isn't now, at least not directly): We're still sort of  discussing what the overall future is. But, a lot of this is still exploratory and experimental. So we're still more interested in figuring out where it can go and what it means before we do anything like that.

September 22nd, 2006

HP press conference: Inventory of gory details, Hurd "clean," Dunn steps down

Posted by David Berlind @ 2:22 pm

Categories: General, IT Matters, Legal, Podcasts

Tags:

I just got done listening to and recording HP’s press conference regarding the news that has come to light in recent weeks — more specifically, the fact that HP engaged in multiple questionable practices in an effort to uncover the source of leaks from its board room meetings.  News.com’s coverage of the event is here. My colleague Dan Farber has coverage as well. Using the player above, you can listen to the entire press conference by streaming it or downloading it.  If you are already subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts, it will turn up automatically on your system, your MP3 player, or both The press conference principally involved two speakers — HP CEO Mark Hurd and Mike Holston, an attorney with Morgan Lewis, the law firm that was retained by Hurd in the earlier days of the investigation and now, the law firm that represents HP in its dealing with state and federal authorities on this particular matter.

As Hurd began the conference, he made it clear that he still did not have all the facts, and also pointed out that they may never have all of them. Later in the conference, he pointed out that part of the problem in getting all the facts had to do with the fact that they were dealing with an outside investigative firm.  That firm was identified as Security Outsourcing Solutions (aka: SOS) and it was also pointed out during the conference that SOS outsourced some of the work it was doing to another outfit known as Active Research Group.

Hurd seemed incredibly contrite during his presentation (far more so than Patricia Dunn, the now former HP chairwoman, ever did) and, on several occasions reminded the attendees and listeners that the practices used to uncover certain information (in the course of the investigation) were very uncharacteristic of the sort of integrity that HP’s management wants the company to be known for by both its customers and employees. While he didn’t condone the techniques, Hurd did say that the investigation was justified given the fact that the leaks were damaging to the company and that the practice of leaking information to the press violated company policies.  Hurd said that investigating the leaks was an "appropriate course of action" but characterized the techniques as "isolated incidents of impropriety" and as "having no place in HP."

Hurd looked to clear his own name, saying he never approved of the tracing technology that was embedded into the e-mails sent to CNET News.com’s Dawn Kawamoto.  HP investigators hoped that Kawamoto would forward the e-mail to her source and that the tracing technology might lead them to whoever was responsible for the leaks. Hurd apparently approved the content of the e-mail, a detail that was offered later in the conference by Holston.

Effectively immediately, Hurd had accepted Patricia Dunn’s resignation from what appears to be the board of directors entirely. A different move from the one originally planned where she would step down as chairwoman in January but remain on the board as director.  Apparently replacing her, as an independent director, is Richard Hackborn.

Before handing the microphone to Holston, Hurd said he was taking full accountablity for the matter from this point forward. 

Holston then went into the four primary techniques involved in the investigation. Namely

• The use of pretexting to obtain phone and fax records
• The use of social security numbers in the course of pretexting
• The sending of emails with tracers
• Physical surveillance

Holston noted that investigators, in the course of physical surveillance, had even engaged in a bit of dumpster diving — looking through one female reporter’s (probably Kawamoto’s) trash.  In all, Holston said the investigation targeted two current HP employees, seven current or former members of the board of directors, and nine journalists.

September 21st, 2006

Move over iTunes. Here comes the Secure Video Processor Alliance

Posted by David Berlind @ 9:30 am

Categories: Digital Restrictions Management, Entertainment, General, Hollywood on Demand, IT Matters, Mobile, Personal Technology, Podcasts, Wired & Wireless

Tags:

Meet Jas Saini.  He’s chairman of the Secure Video Processor Alliance — an alliance whose members are not about to take Apple’s incursion into the home entertainment and content multiplexing market lying down.

The battle to be your content multiplexer is on.  It’s a battle that most people don’t even know is taking place.  But it is. And it’s too early to declare a winner. What is a content multiplexer? It’s the device — essentially a cache — that lives at the nexus of the converging worlds of computer technology and the entertainment industry.  Think of it as the train station through which all content — for example, a movie — arrives into your home and is then subsequently distributed to other consumption componentry. Apple’s iTunes software is one of the most well known examples. Via its Internet-based connection, it can take delivery of content from the iTune Music Store and distribute it to other components.  In addition to being able to burn music to a CD for use on a CD player, it can also distribute content to Apple’s portable playback devices (iPods), other computers running the iTunes software, and, announced last week, to a device that lives in your home entertainment center — a device that Apple has codenamed iTV.  Last week, Apple announced that movies would be available through the iTunes music store — thereby expanding the scope of content types that iTunes can aggregate and distribute. 

Apple is not alone in its quest to be the central cache for all your content. There’s at least one other company — your local cable TV provider — that in some cases already has that job and wants to keep it.  In the cable TV world, content is delivered through pipes that are owned and manged by the cable TV provider (the wire outside your house) into your Personal Video Recorder (PVR, a TiVo device is an example of one of these) and then from there, the PVR takes on the role of being the content multiplexer. As far as PVR content multiplexers go, TiVo was one of the first to demonstrate this capability with a service known as TiVo-to-Go that could transfer content from your TiVo PVR to a portable playback device. More recently however, Motorola has demonstrated a similar architecture, capable of moving content from its PVRs to its mobile handsets such as the Motorola Q smartphone.

The battle doesn’t stop there. Then, there’s your local phone company — the Baby Bells whose primary source of revenue (the voice business) is being devastated by competing services from the local cable companies, and more recently, from Voice-over-IP technoloiges like Skype that work over the Internet connection (in some cases, a connection that the phone company itself is providing). In an effort to survive, the Baby Bells are diversifying into the content delivery space as well. Using their exclusive access to the dark (unused) fiber optic  technology that may already have been installed outside your home, the phone companies are gearing up to deliver extremely high quality content (eg: Hi-definition) through services like Video-on-Demand and, rest assured, they’re just as interested in being your content multiplexer as Apple and the cable guys are. 

But wait, there’s more. Ripping a page out of Apple’s book, Microsoft is, between its forthcoming Zune brand and its Media Center PC, also gunning to handle all of your content multiplexing. DirecTV, electric utilities and other outfits that already have a "content consumption" relationship with consumers want in as well and now, even some large merchants are tossing their hats into the ring. Amazon, for example, recently joined the fray with its Unbox video service for downloading movies and, while these mostly wire-line providers duke it out,  many of the cellular phone companies are quietly looking to sneak around center court with a come-from-nowhere win that leverages their wireless connections as the delivery vehicle. 

This brings me to my next point which is that to be declared the winner in the content multiplexing market is the equivalent of winning all the marbles. Because of the convergence that’s happening between technology, telecommunications, and entertainment, the stakes in this battle are extremely high. Whereas some outfits like Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon are happy to rely on a delivery pipe they don’t own (the Internet), the phone, cable, satellite (DirecTV), and cellco companies see

Read the rest of this entry »

September 8th, 2006

Caught on tape: Amazon's tech support not exactly ready to help users of its Unbox service

Posted by David Berlind @ 12:24 pm

Categories: Digital Restrictions Management, Entertainment, General, Hollywood on Demand, IT Matters, Mobile, Personal Technology, Podcasts, Security, Software Infrastructure, Web Technology

Tags:

Relying on Microsoft’s digital rights management technology (DRM), which was recently hacked, may not be the only challenge Amazon ends up facing now that it has launched its Unbox video download service.  Another one could be technical support since the service involves the installation of Amazon-specific software on customer’s systems (not to mention the fact that DRM technologies have proven fallible in the past).

As I perused the Unbox area of Amazon.com, I noticed how there were quite a few technical requirements for it to work. Unbox is only guaranteed to run on certain systems with certain software and a handful of mobile devices. I can’t help but wonder if Amazon is biting off more than it can chew. Being in the e-commerce business is one thing. But tackling software support? History has proven to the industry that technical support is not only really hard, but it snowballs into a far bigger cost center than anyone ever anticipates. Amazon no doubt has had to support its site for some time now. But locally installable software support en masse? It’s a totally different beast.  

As such, I figured I poke around to see what exactly was available in the form of support from Amazon. A more graphical form of this can be found in an image gallery with captions and annotations that I’ve put together here on ZDNet (though it’s not as detailed as this post).

As can be seen from the partial screenshot (right) of Amazon’s Unbox help page (and in a bit of "don’t call us, we’ll call you"), there are only two ways to reach Amazon for technical support: (1) via e-mail and (2) via request for Amazon to call you.  Bear in mind that time could be of the essence when attempting to get help on something like a rental that expires in 24 hours. Or, what if you’re about to get on a plane? In time senstive situations like these, e-mail is less than optimal. But, judging by the text in the "Contact Us" box which says "Talk to Customer Service by phone. Provide your phone number and we’ll call you right away," there’s a way to get more timely support.

Right away?  So, just to see how it worked, I gave it a try. I clicked the "Buy Phone" button and it led me to a Web page, a partial screen shot of which appears below:

Clicking the "Call Me" button results in a browser pop-up window in which I was prompted for my phone number and the time frame in which I wanted to receive my support call (choices were "Right now" or in 5, 10, or 15 minutes).  I picked "Right Now" and pressed the submit button, but not before queuing up my podcast recording gear to capture a recording of the call. The podcast can be downloaded, played back using the streaming player at the top of this blog, or, if you’re subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts, it’ll be downloaded to your system or MP3 player automatically (see ZDNet’s podcasts: How to tune in). 

The phone rang nearly instaneously (it actually caught me by surprise) and as I picked it up, I thought to myself that it would be unbelievable if there was actually a human on the other end already.  As you might suspect by now, there wasn’t.

In fact, as you can hear from the recording, I was passed through two recordings. The first of these said:

Hello, we’ll be connecting your call momentarily, we look forward to speaking with you.

Then, I was switched over to another recording that went something like this:

Thank you for calling Amazon.com customer service. We are currently not available to take your call. Our regular hours are 6AM-8PM Monday through Friday and 6AM-5PM Saturday and Sunday Pacific Standard Time. Please try your call again later.

It was 6:15 AM Pacific Time. I always get Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time confused.  But maybe that accounts for why no one was there.  Daylight Savings Time or "summer time" is what makes it seem as though we have daylight until 9PM in the middle of the summer.  Normally (Standard Time), that would be 8PM.  In other words, 6:15 Standard Time ends up as 7:15 Daylight Savings Time which in turn means that 6:15 Daylight Savings Time is really 5:15 Standard Time (45 minutes early compared to Amazon’s declared hours for Tech support).  Actually, this discussion is ridiculous.  It shouldn’t matter.  It appears as though Amazon is trying to open its support center in time for start of business on the East Coast of the US (6AM Pacific Time is the same as 9AM East Coast Time) and it shouldn’t matter what time of year it is.

When Amazon automatically hangs up the phone, the browser pop-up window transitions to a good-bye message.  I think my caption on that screen shot says it all. 

One footnote to this: The customer callback feature is only available to people in the US and Canada while nothing seems to prevent people outside those two countries from acquiring video downloads through Unbox. Given the complexities of DRM and the technical difficulties that could ensue and given the way customers can’t their money back, there needs to be some verbiage on Amazon’s site that this is really only for customers based in the US and Canada and that if you’re not in one of those two countries, that timely technical support for the service is not available.

August 3rd, 2006

XenSource CTO takes on Oracle's criticisms, discusses virtues of paravirtualization

Posted by David Berlind @ 10:06 am

Categories: General, Hardware Infrastructure, IT Management, IT Matters, Open Source, Podcasts, Security, Software Infrastructure

Tags:

It was just a couple of days ago that virtualization technology provider XenSource was the target of not one but two rounds of public criticism — one levied at it by Red Hat, the other by Oracle.  Since I haven’t spent any quality time with the folks at XenSource, I thought that now might be a good opportunity to do a podcast interview with the company’s chief technology officer and co-founder Simon Crosby.  We didn’t get into the Red Hat issue since Red Hat has since retracted its statement. According to The Register, Red Hat said the following as a part of a larger statement in an effort to put the faux pas behind the two companies:

Red Hat is firmly committed to open source virtualization, based on the open source Xen project. We believe the technology from the Xen project is one key component of a virtualization platform which will deliver significant benefits to customers, improving the economics, flexibility, and responsiveness of their IT investments, which we will deliver in the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat is investing agressively in the Xen project and in ensuring its readiness for the enterprise.

Crosby did however suggest that Oracle’s comments about the need for a standard way to access virtualization technology is complete nonsense. According to Crosby, in what he described as a technical breaththrough, XenSource and VMware worked through those issues at the recent Ottawa Linux Symposium.  The outcome — a solution that involves a standard way for operating systems to interface with hypervisors (the layer of software that handles hardware virtualization) — will work for Microsoft as well by virtue of the relationship that Microsoft and XenSource hammered out with each other earlier this year.

You can download the podcast or use the player at the top of this post to play it back streaming style.  If you’re subscribed to the IT Matters series of podcasts, it’ll show up automatically on your PC, your MP3 player, or both (depending on how your podcatcher is configured).

Crosby and I covered a lot of ground — everything from Oracle’s comments to any challenges that XenSource has to deal with now that the virtualization technologies from AMD and Intel will be incompatible with each other at the chip level to the licensing revolution that will need to take place as a result of virtualization.  Crosby also spoke at length about a technique called paravirtualization that he believes is the way to go and one that separates XenSource’s approach from others.  Here’s sampling of Crosby’s quotes from the podcast:

• Xen runs very well on laptops.  There are a couple of implementations for the Intel VT Core Duo processors. It runs very happily there. What hasn’t emerged quite as rapidly is the market there. VMware has done extremely well as indeed to some extent as Microsoft in the desktop market which is more about developers where the developer is developing for a different platform or they have some complex application, they can have a whole bunch of VMs on a single machine rather than having a whole bunch of hardware.
• The industry has a constant romance with the thin client notion
• The failover, high availability and supportability that [virtualization]introduces is quite profound….in general people are not talking about "higher availability"…. I think it will be the next big value proposition for virtualization once its out there and the basic server consolidation message is well-appreciated and the people have bought into this, I think the focus is going to turn onto this in very very big way.
• At some point, somebody has got to stand up and say "Hey Mr. Ellison. I owe you a virtual two-way and not a four-ways worth of CPU license." Now, I don’t want to have that conversation with him.  I just want to enable it.
• We’re simpling enabling users to get back what they paid for… to enable to take advantage of Moore’s Law. We’ve been stuck for some strange reason based on the fact that software and hardware have been initimately tied together. That stalled the availability of Moore’s Law to the customer. The stuff that they’ve been purchasing, they haven’t really been getting the benefit of. And now we’re going to change that.
• Even in the storage world, the number of SAN end-points will change.  So, if I had 50,000 servers and I now have 10,000 servers, that’s a smaller number of HBAs but as far as the array vendors are concerned, it’s less money. So, across the board, everybody had to rethink what they’re going to do from a price perspective.
• We accomodate the differences between Intel and AMD at a sub-architectural level within Xen. Interestingly enough and fortunately enough the Intel engineering groups and the AMD engineering groups sat down and worked with us and designed that interface so there would be commonality so there is no issue whatsoever.
• The architecture that Xen innovated is called paravirtualization. Microsoft calls that "englightenment." The key innovation there is that there are tremendous performance, efficiency, and security benefits when the guest is made somewhat aware of the fact that it is virtualized. If the guest knows that it’s virtualized, it can collaborate with the hypervisor to achieve far greater performance of memory management, better management of CPU, and I/O.  

July 27th, 2006

Caught on tape: Another support call nightmare (this time, Bank of America)

Posted by David Berlind @ 11:34 am

Categories: General, IT Matters, Podcasts, Security, Software Infrastructure

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In this third caught-on-tape installment (#1 T-Mobile, #2 Ticketmaster) in of a series of IT Matters podcasts I’m calling The Support Files,  I’ve got Bank of America on tape giving me blantantly false information about the customer service phone numbers on the back of its ATM cards.  Not only that, the recording of my attempt to locate a human while navigating the company’s interactive voice response system (IVR) on the telephone demonstrates how BofA falls apart during a critical moment of truth: that moment when you’re standing in front of an ATM machine that’s outside of the country and its not working (in other words, you can’t get to your money). 

This situation actually happened to me during a recent stay in Canada.  I walked up to an ATM machine, put my BofA ATM card into the slot, and, after entering my PIN number, it responded with a message that it could not access my account.  I took my card back and, naturally, flipped it over in search of a phone number to call to rectify the situation.  I was out of money and needed cash. Very clearly printed on the back of my BofA ATM card are two phone numbers for customer service. One is a toll-free 800 number. The other is a number for cardholders to call if they’re outside the US. It’s 315-724-4022. Since I was in Canada, I called the second number and the message I got was that the number was no longer in service and that no further information was available. So, imagine if you’re out of the country with no access to your cash and no way to reach your bank.  Problem?  You betcha.

On a wing and a prayer, I tried the 800 number and it actually worked from Canada (contrary to what the card suggests…another little customer moment of truth).  I found my way to a human (a painful process: strangely, for a number printed on the back of an ATM card, there’s no option for "I’m at an ATM machine and can’t get to my money") and, in the process of resolving the problem, the customer service rep said she’d look into the disconnected number.  There are basically two ways for BofA to solve the main problem.  The company must either (1) reclaim that phone number and make sure it rings through to its customer service center or [not sure if this is even possible] (2) re-issue ATM cards to all of its customers with the correct number on the back [imagine the expense?].  To leave things as they are as BofA has so far done is putting its customers at significant risk.  Not just the ones who travel internationally, but also the one that, for some reason, can’t get the 800# to work (which I’ve had happen to me at pay phones).

So, yesterday, more than a month later, I decided to try that 315 number again.  And again, I got the same message.  So, once again, I called the 800 number and found my way to a human even though no such option is clearly offered.  After I explained the problem, the customer service rep (who was very pleasant over the phone) looked at her own ATM card to verify that I had the right number (which I did) and here’s the exchange that took place next:

BofA rep: What I’m going to do…I did just look into this a little bit further.. that is the same number, OK.. basically, what must have happened is that day, OK, that you called, the phone line must have been down at some point.
DB: No I just called it a few moments ago. It’s still down.
BofA rep: You just called it a few moments ago and you’re out of the country?
DB: No, no, no.  I’m back in the country right now.
BofA rep: But that [number] is for outside of the country.
DB: It only works outside of the country?
BofA rep: Outside of the country, correct.
….
DB: So, in other words, this is only a phone number that works outside of North America?
BofA rep: That’s correct….So, if it’s outside of North America and you called that number, it will go through. If you call from inside, it’s not going to go through.

You can hear this entire exchange in my recording of the call, plus you can hear me ask at one point, how it was that they were able to verify my ability to access my account by checking the phone number I was calling from.  I have CallerID blocked on all outbound calls.  Does BofA have

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July 26th, 2006

Another support call and e-commerce nightmare: This time, it's Ticketmaster

Posted by David Berlind @ 11:49 am

Categories: Entertainment, General, IT Matters, Podcasts, Web Technology

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Compared to the debacle of a support call that I had with T-Mobile, at least the one thing positive I can say about today’s support call with Ticketmaster to overcome a ticket purchasing problem with its Web site (which I’ve recorded for your listening pleasure) is how pleasant everybody was that I spoke to, even though they were ultimately unable to resolve the problem to my satisfaction. You can download a recording of the call, or it’s streamable with the built-in player above, or, of you’re subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts, it will automatically get downloaded to your computer and/or MP3 player. 

She tells me to keep refreshing the page because the missing option might suddenly appear if she’s successful in contacting the right people.

This morning started like most mornings.  A 5:30 AM swim at the Y.  Breakfast with the kids (Honey-Nut Cheerios).  A check of my e-mail inbox (all four of them). Only this morning, thanks to my subscription to Ticketmaster’s alert service, there was an update that caught my attention.  The Rolling Stones are apparently coming back to Boston (I missed their first swing through the neighborhood).  I’ve seen Pink Floyd and the Who.  But the Stones are still on the list of British Invasion bands (along with the Beatles and the Kinks) that I never got to see (despite all of them being intact when I was old enough to start going to rock concerts).  Neither my wife nor my 16 year old son have seen the Stones live either. 

A visit to Ticketmaster’s Web site (partial screen shot below) revealed that a special class of tickets — presale tickets — would go on sale today at 10AM ET.  This, I thought, was my golden opportunity.  My expectation wasn’t that I’d get first row or anything like that.  It was just that I’d be one of many early birds that would get some decent seats that would probably be gone by 10:10.  What is "presale?"  To participate in the presale, you need to be a member of the Rollingstones.com fan club.  I’m not a member.  But the ticket selection page on Ticketmaster’s Web site very clearly states the following:

Not a Fan Club Member Yet? You can purchase tickets before the general public by ordering a RollingStones.com Fan Club Membership during the presale as part of your ticket purchase transaction, which will cost another $100 USD. In approximately 10 business days, RollingStones.com will send you an email so that you can then activate your membership.

Here’s a partial screen shot with the right-most 5 pixels cut off (due to width limitations):

Even though the tickets to see the Stones are pretty steep, I was willing to pay $100 extra to get access to the presale.  After all, this could be the last tour for Mick & crew and it’s not often that we (as a family) treat ourselves to something so special.  So, this offer from Ticketmaster was perfect for me.  As you can tell from the text, if you’re not already a member, Ticketmaster can wrap the cost of becoming one right into the presale of the tickets. What makes this great is that I don’t have to drop $100 to become a member in the event that I don’t like the seats that Ticketmaster offers me.  If, for example, I join the fan club through RollingStones.com, my $100 is gone whether I like the seats Ticketmaster has to offer, or not.

So, at about 9:50 AM, I made sure I was logged into Ticketmaster with my user ID and password, I tee’d up the Stones ticket selection page (which was "inactive" for the next 10 minutes) and popped up a seating chart in another browser window in case I had to make some quick decisions.  Then, after the clocked ticked 9:59, I started pressing the refresh button and sure enough,

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July 25th, 2006

Publicly selected and funded investigative reporting: Can it work?

Posted by David Berlind @ 10:36 am

Categories: General, IT Matters, Podcasts, Web Technology

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Meet Jay Rosen. If you’ve frequented the inner circles of journalism, joined a public conversation about the media, or paid any attention to the so-called "a-listers" of the blogosphere, then chances are you’ve encountered the New York University-based professor of journalism, or at least his media/journalism watchdog blog at PressThink.org.  After more than 19 years as a critic of the American press, Rosen was one of the first (if not the first) from the halls of journalism academia in early 2005 to say that the distinction between bloggers and journalists is one that’s no longer worth drawing (in his essay Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over). Wrote Rosen in that post:

And so we know [that blogs are] journalism– sometimes. They’re even capable, at times, and perhaps only in special circumstances, of beating Big Journalism at its own game. [The New York Times' John] Schwartz said so. The tsunami story is the biggest humanitarian disaster ever in the lifetimes of most career journalists and the blogs were somehow right there with them.

Today, some 18 months later, such special circumstances are melting into the bytework of the blogosphere as its bloggers routinely scoop the established media with a raw voice that smacks of unvarnished truth, particularly when compared to the sugar coated versions from the so-called pros that taste great but are often less filling. In an affirmation of Rosen’s proclamation, Apple earlier this month gave up its court battle to force certain enthusiast sites to unmask the internal sources at the Cupertino-based company who surreptitiously furnished the "new media" with the iPod maker’s trade secrets. Said a three judge panel in a ruling that afforded the Web reporters the protection of California’s journalist shield law:

We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes ‘legitimate journalism…’ 

Today, the special circumstances that Rosen spoke of in his original essay no longer seem to be the case as ordinary citizens equipped with their own tools of the trade — Web 2.0-based printing presses (aka blogs), digital cameras, video cameras, and audio recorders — routinely beat the established media at their own game.  Even worse for the established media, a growing amount of the limited consumption time that people spend with content is being redirected to this new breed of journalism, eating away at the old guard’s coveted audience numbers and ultimately, their revenues.

Now, after watching the media as it appears to be reinventing itself right before his very eyes, Rosen has decided to insert himself right into the heart of the beast as he looks to be a change agent who will test the readiness of the public to all at once become a virtual assignment editor, an army of fact checkers and gatherers, and the financier of no possible strings attached (there’s no advertising) investigative reporting.

Today, Rosen announced an experiment he is calling NewAssignment.Net.  Although the domain is not yet active, the basic idea behind NewAssignment.Net is for the public to not only play assignment editor by collaboratively deciding what stories require the devoted attention of an investigative reporter, but also to help furnish that reporter with whatever information, facts, evidence, funding, and other resources that may be necessary to tell a complete and truthful story. 

The idea of such community-driven investigative reporting — where the groundwork may be distributed but the final result is assembled by one or a handful of people — reminds me very much of how Groklaw has operated over the years with respect to SCO v. IBM.  Groklaw essentially became the place for poeple who were motivated by the truth to provide whatever material information they could, even if the effort commanded a certain amount of their own time or personal resources. 

Perhaps the best example of this was when certain members of the Groklaw community not only unearthed a license agreement  for Unix between AT&T and The Regents of the University of California that was thought to be permanently sealed from public viewing, they also scanned that paper document into a PDF file and transcribed the text of it as best as they could (some parts were illegible) onto the Web. Not only did the revelation help to demonstrate the weaknesses of some of SCO’s claims against IBM, it shows a degree of media transparency in action as Groklaw editor/publisher Pamela "PJ" Jones published both the PDF scan and the transcription of it simultaneously (in the event that anybody reading the "official Groklaw transcription" doubted its content). 

The order of events on Groklaw certainly sets a precedent for what NewAssignment.Net is looking to do. Prior to gaining access to the agreement, Groklaw’s PJ routinely summoned her community of readers and participants to dig it up if they could.  In other words, the community got to decide first whether the effort was worth any investment of its time or resources.  Then, the community made that investment, and got the results it was looking for.   According to Rosen, NewAssignment will operate on nearly the same principles where the community backs the editorial operation. 

If you’re a listener of the publicly funded NPR, then you’re probably wondering why this is any different? In my podcast interview of Rosen (downloadable, streamable with the built-in player above, or, of you’re subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts, it will automatically get downloaded to your computer and/or MP3 player),  I asked Rosen that very question and here’s what he said [at 12:40 into the interview]:

The way it raises money is very different from NPR.  At NPR, they say "thank you very much for your contribution. Our professionals will take over the work from here." And, what we say is, "We have a story, we think. And we’ve collected a lot of good information. But there’s a lot we don’t know. Here’s how to add your knowledge.  Here’s how to make it happen with your dollars.  With NPR, the assumption is that you trust the professionals.  They know how to do it and they’ll come back with something that satisfies you.  At NewAssignment, you’re in the middle of it.

Indeed, the process and the business model may be different from those of NPR. But, with a dependence on funding from contributors that want the best reporting possible, I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not, at the very least, NewAssignment.Net could end up competing for the limited number of disposable dollars that Americans have to contribute to non-commercial news production.  During the interview, not only did I ask Rosen about that, I also asked Craig Newmark (also on the line) what he thought.  Newmark participated in the interview as a concerned citizen who, in his words, believes that the Constitution is in crises (thereby warranting better press).  But he’s also the founder of the ever popular online classified ad service CraigsList. With $10,000 from his personal bank account, Newmark is providing the initial round of funding for NewAssignment.Net’s first project.

To hear more about the plan that Rosen is hatching and what Newmark had to say about whether he was reallocating dollars that were earmarked for NPR, or whether he was digging deeper for new money to fund NewAssignment.Net, check out the podcast.  

July 24th, 2006

Dabble dips into social networking for x-site video indexing and search

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:18 pm

Categories: Entertainment, General, IT Matters, Personal Technology, Podcasts, Web Technology

Tags:

Here’s something that pretty much everyone has had happen to them (or, at least you can relate to it): You do some search on the Internet and find you’re way to an audio or video file.  But, when you get there, the name of the file has pretty much nothing to do with what you’re searching for.  As it turns out though, somewhere deep inside the video, is the needle that you’ve been looking for in a haystack.  Well, if that haystack is the collection of 240 YouTube, Guba, or Google video-like video sites on the Web (most of which only keep track of what’s stored on their own domains) and the needle is some 15 seconds of audio or video that’s buried deep inside some multimedia content on one of those sites, then Dabble may be able to help you sort through the chaff to get to the wheat. 

Yes — there are other video search sites on the Web. But, where Dabble founder and CEO Mary Hodder says her company is different is that it leverages the best that the read/write Web and the social Web have to offer by letting users manage the sort of tagging and categorization that enables such granular searches of what’s otherwise very opaque content. After a year of development and testing, Hodder and her seven person team (mostly engineers) launched Dabble today and I caught up with her by telephone for a podcast interview. The interview can be downloaded, played back using the streaming player at the top of this blog, or, if you’re subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts, it’ll be downloaded to your system or MP3 player automatically (see ZDNet’s podcasts: How to tune in).

During the interview, Hodder told me that even though the site is initially focused on video, it will also be covering other forms of multimedia content including audio.  But it’s the social network — the type of ecosystem that Hodder is intimately familiar with as a blogging consultant and the author of napsterization.org — that Hodder feels sets Dabble apart.  Said Hodder in the interview:

But in addition [to the search capabilities you'd find on other video search services], we’ve really tightly integrated a social network. So, from a user perespective, I could go to Dabble and I could just collect media that I’m interested in.  It helps me to organize it. I can put the tags on it that I like, change things. But when I go to search, I’m also getting some enhanced search results because of the things that people do in the social site — the organizational part of the site.  Because it’s tightly integrated, we can draw on the things that people do.  So, if I make a playlist with five videos and I call those the best How-To videos for cooking souffles, or the best skateboarding videos, that’s a really strong indication that those videos are going to fulfill somebodies needs if they go to search for skateboarding [or souffles].  So Dabble can pull those playlist indicators out and put them back into search results.  So you really don’t have to be a user of the social site to benefit from it.

Launching a few weeks out, Hodder expects Dabble to include an embedded media player.  The company is dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on some deals with some of the hosting outfits that specialize in video.  According to Dabble, if they don’t get permission to play certain video back in Dabble’s embedded player, Dabble’s users will simply have to go directy to the host’s site instead.  But that won’t preclude those videos from shoing up in the Dabble search engine.  In fact, the library of searchable videos can include anything including TV shows and videos. 

While Dabble survives on seed funding, the site’s business model will be primarily ad-driven.  Search results cannot be bought.  However, much like Google, relevant paid ads will appear off to the side.  Perhaps the thing that’s most compelling abou this approach, if you ask me is that relevance-based ad surfacing is a bit of a black art.  Even with text (making video that much harder).  But, with Dabble’s users adding their own tags to video,  the relevance of any contextually served ads should theoretically improve (as long as the integrity of the tags are preserved). 

July 24th, 2006

In marriage of 'CPUs and GPUs,' ATI snapped-up by AMD. Is NVidia next?

Posted by David Berlind @ 6:46 am

Categories: General, Hardware Infrastructure, IT Matters, Mobile, Personal Technology, Podcasts

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In another one of the worst kept secrets in the technology industry, AMD has shelled out $5.4B for Canada-based video and graphics solution provider ATI Technologies.  According to the aforelinked Reuters news story:

Talk of a tie-up between the two companies first emerged in May. Over the weekend, the rumors intensified until it was almost considered a done deal on Sunday…Many industry analysts have said it made little financial or strategic sense for AMD to buy ATI outright. But AMD, the No. 2 supplier of processors, said it will use the purchase of Canada-based ATI to expand its product mix and its market share as it battles No. 1 Intel.

This morning, in a before-the-bell, in a press conference giving by the two company’s executives, ATI president David Orton referred to the deal as a marriage of CPUs (central processing units from AMD) and GPUs (graphics processing units from ATI). I recorded the entire conference as a podcast. It can be downloaded, played back using the streaming player at the top of this blog, or, if you’re subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts, it’ll be downloaded to your system or MP3 player automatically (see ZDNet’s podcasts: How to tune in).

The conference was kicked off by AMD CEO Hector Ruiz who said (excerpts):

Together, we Intend to create a processing powerhouse … [Our customers have] been asking us to do this for them.  The ATI team will play a key role in defining our feature.  …  we are confident that the companies and cultures will integrate well together.  With this transaction, we will move from being neighbors [on the motherboard] to being family. ….

During the call, AMD president Dirk Meyer and ATI president Dave Orton confirmed that the companies see a future where graphics technologies are integrated into the microprocessor silicon much the same way that AMD’s approaches to component design have on several occasions pressured Intel to rethink its business. AMD already integrates memory controller technology into the same dies as its CPUs.  Some of the repeated themes heard throughout the conference were growth, innovation, choice, and something the executives routinely referred to as "customer-centric platforms" that the executives expect the merged company to begin delivering as early as 2007.  What are "customer-centric platforms?"  As best as can be told from the conference, it refers to a variety of CPU/GPU-integrated solutions, each of which is optimized to service specific applications in the enterprise and personal computing spaces, the mobile handset space, and in consumer electronics.

During the Q&A part of the conference, I asked the executives if this foray into specialized computing solutions across those segments means that we’ll be seeing a diminished role for the PC over the long haul and whether this move was positioning the company for that reality.  They downplayed the idea that the PC’s role would be diminished and instead spoke of better PCs for the applications that need them like multimedia.  But, given the two companies’ ambitions in the mobile market where there are already nearly three times as many handsets than there are PCs, I’m not so sure.  With every day, the generalized PC is increasingly becoming a relic, giving way to devices like dedicated mobile (and connected) gaming consoles as well as the Motorola Q and RIM’s BlackBerries that seem every bit as powerful as the PCs that were in the marketplace just a few years ago.

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July 20th, 2006

Does GridApp have the silver bullet of database provisioning and management?

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:27 pm

Categories: General, IT Management, IT Matters, Podcasts, Software Infrastructure

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Systems management has always been something of a black art for businesses. They start off with good intentions.  You know the ones I’m talking about where, much the same way SouthWest Airlines flies only one kind of jet, businesses attempt to standardize all of their technology to make it more manageable.  All desktops, notebooks and servers from one company.  All application software from another.  All networking gear from a third.  It makes sense.  But, hard as they may try, rarely does it happen that IT departments have end up with the luxury of such homogeneity.  Whether it just happens naturally, or by way of M&A, Most database implementations rely on SQL code that’s far from standard. what’s more likely is that businesses end up with a variety of systems from a variety of manufacturers running a variety of operating systems and applications and before they know it, they’ve got IT personnel dedicated to the task of managing those systems — provisioning them, installing and deinstalling software on them, patching them, upgrading them, etc. — using a quiltwork of management tools from the hardware and software manufacturer that they’ve bought from over the years.

That heterogeneity resulted in more efficient cross-platform management tools that gave IT managers one place to turn instead of 10 to stay ahead of the systems management game. Companies like Rackspace who gave up on hardware to focus on cross-platform software come to mind, Altiris, OpsWare, and Computer Associates are others. But somewhere beyond managing a company’s physical and application infrastructures is that pesky data: data that always comes home to roost somewhere.  And that somewhere is typically a relational database management system — another type of infrastructure where most businesses wish they had the luxury of standards.  But for whatever reasons, they may not.

While the various database solution providers — Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft, IBM, MySQL, etc. — may each provide their own set of tools for managing their own databases (much the way application and physical infrastructure providers do), there isn’t a bumper crop of cross-database management solution providers to make database management (provisioning, patching, etc.) in a heterogeneous database environment more efficient. The problem? Just as with the other infrastructures, few companies these days have the luxury of a homogeneous data environment. All it takes is one merger or acquisition to upset the homogeneous applecart. Even those companies that swore off the idea of multiple RDBMSes

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July 19th, 2006

Unplugged: AMD's Queen of most things commercial Margaret Lewis

Posted by David Berlind @ 4:24 pm

Categories: General, Hardware Infrastructure, IT Matters, Personal Technology, Podcasts

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Not ready to give up the pure-64 bit approach to high-volume servers just yet, Intel this week rolled-out the Montecito members of its Itanium family of processors. Amongst other features, one of Montecito’s key attributes is its dual core nature. Then, later this month, on July 27th, Intel is expected to roll out more dual core processors, this time for desktops and notebooks (as opposed to the high-performance computing server market that Itanium targets).

By the end of 2007, Intel expects all of its new chips to be multi-core chips and, according to industry watchers and benchmarks, the beleaguered company which just axed 1000 of its middle managers as a part of a cost-cutting exercise appears to finally be on the verge of reclaiming the many performance crowns that rival chipmaker AMD has wrested away from it over the last few years.  Intel’s leapfrogging of AMD has left many wondering if AMD can rebound or might Intel have evolved to a point where it can leverage its size and prowess to beat AMD at it’s own game. To make things even more challenging for the smaller AMD, the two chipmakers have finally parted ways on compatibility for good.  Sure, AMD’s Opteron  technology and the AMD64 architecture was a slight departure from compatibility with some of Intel’s offerings, but Intel reacted with similar chips that sealed up the incompatibility gaps. The same however cannot be said of the two companies virtualization technologies (AMD-V and Intel VT) — technologies that turn a single computer into multiple ones that are partitioned from each other. 

On June 14th, AMD’s director of commercial solutions Margaret Lewis joined me at my home office-based podcast studio to explain how AMD plans to keep it’s edge.  The interview is one of several that I’ve had to dredge up from the ashes after my IBM Thinkpad T42 suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure.  The interview can be downloaded.  Or, if you’re already subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts, it may have already automatically downloaded to your computer and MP3 player (see how to subscribe to ZDNet’s podcasts).

Among the many questions I asked of Lewis were those that were posed by ZDNet’s readers in response to my blog post that solicited questions from our audience members.  But we covered a lot of ground… everything from the two titles she holds with AMD to the company’s processor roadmap to her background that stretches back to the Ray Noorda days at Novell to rumors that AMD may acquire video card maker ATI as well as the company’s sell-off of its MIPS-based Alchemy divison to Raza Technologies.

July 18th, 2006

T-Mobile: 'No hotspot? Sorry, no refund either'

Posted by David Berlind @ 1:22 pm

Categories: General, IT Matters, Legal, Mobile, Personal Technology, Podcasts, Wired & Wireless

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Last Friday, the morning after Mashup Camp ended, I made it to my flight’s gate at the San Francisco airport with about 30 minutes to spare.  Knowing that T-Mobile operates an airport-wide hotspot, I figured that 30 minutes was just enough time to log into the hotspot, do a couple critical emails, and post my podcast interview of Eventful.com’s Chris Radcliff.  I took at seat in the airport lounge by the gate, popped open my notebook, enabled my WiFi adapter and saw that the signal strength for T-Mobile’s hotspot was "Excellent" (according to Windows).  It was clear from his tone that not reading the terms & conditions was an oversight on my part. Good I thought.  I fired up the browser and the first place it took me to was T-Mobile’s Web site where it showed me a bunch of options, one of which was perfect for me (the one where you pay $6.99 per hour).  But I couldn’t find a way to use it so I clicked through the day pass option for $9.99 instead.  But the minute I supplied all of my personal information including a confirmation of the payment by credit card, the WiFi signal mysteriously dropped to almost nil and I was unable to get a reliable connection.  It flittered in and out, but not for long enough to load a Web page or log on to the company network. 

I tried every trick I knew (and I have a lot of tricks having been down this path before with other hotspots) to no avail.  Suddenly, it was time to board.  I got on the plane and even tried to get at T-Mobile’s hotspot while I was in my seat (wouldn’t that be great?… to keep computing online until the flight attendants tell you to shut down?).  But that didn’t work and I gave in, resolving to call T-Mobile at the beginning of this week to get my money back.  After all, if I gave them my money but could not achieve a connection, surely their network management consoles must show that I used all of about 100 bytes and that they should give me my money back.  Today, I made that call and recorded the whole thing. I was very clear with the T-Mobile rep — a guy named Rudy — that I was recording the call.  Given the recent spate of some very public customer service snafus, I figured it was time to fall in-line and keep a podcast record of my support calls in case something goes awry.  You can download my recording of the entire call (it’s about 13 minutes long) or, if you’re already subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts, it should automatically show up on your PC and MP3 player. 

Although Rudy eventually relented with a consolation prize, he refused to issue me a refund saying on several occasions that,

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July 14th, 2006

Time, space put Eventful at the intersection of, .. well, of everything

Posted by David Berlind @ 5:05 pm

Categories: General, IT Matters, Mashup Camp, Podcasts, Web Technology

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This week, at Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, I had the opportunity to sit down with Eventful.com’s API Developer Chris Radcliff. The interview is available for download, streamed playback (using ZDNet’s built-in MP3 player above), or if you’re subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of podcasts, it will be downloaded to your system or MP3 player automatically (see How to Subscribe).

At first blush, it’s hard to figure out how or why a site like Eventful can or would stay in business. Whether the event is yours or not, you can go in and list any event into the system.  Radcliff cites this as one of the very Web 2.0-esque attributes of the site — that fact that anybody can freely read from it or write to it.  The end result, as of very recently according to Radcliff, is that site is now a respository for over 1,000,000 events including everything from the neigboorhood soccer game to a birthday party to a rock concert at Madison Square Garden. Early on, when I and Mashup Camp co-organizer settled on a time and space for Mashup Camp 2, we added it to the Eventful database. 

In fact, it’s that position at intersection of time and space that is one of Eventful’s chief selling propositions. When you think about the assumptions you can make about a visitor to a Web site, the assumptions you can make about someone based on their interest in an event could be an even better demographic than what Google can assume about people searching on specific terms or what Amazon can assume about people based on the books they buy (although, admittedly, with all the stuff beyond books that people buy on Amazon, you can imagine the pretty tight profile that Amazon must have of the users
that engage in a lot of commerce through the site).

According to Radcliff, if you know what users are interested in, where they’re interested in it, and when they’re interested in it "that’s extremely valuable data."  The targeted advertising opportunities — something that Eventful has yet to take advantage of — are pretty clear. According to Radcliff, Eventful is investigating its next move now that it has amassed such tight demographic data. Radcliff hinted at some interesting possibilities saying "you can be the pizza place down the street after the game or you can be the after party that’s going on shortly thereafter [some event]."

Radcliff thinks such advertising leads to a better experience for end-users too because of the relevance (as opposed to randomly placed or less-accurately targeted ads). The more I think about it, the more I realize how knowing what, where, and when is the key to what has long been a very tough nut to crack on the Internet — local targeting. It’s not just advertising to an event goer where there’s a place to get some pizza after the game.  What about where to find pick up some binoculars before the game? Or, where to find a team t-shirt at a discount? Imagine if you’re going to a concert for Bare Naked Ladies, a record store that’s nearby to the concert venue to offer a special price on BNL CDs.

While Eventful contemplates the best way to leverage local targeting, it also has other revenue sources.  For example, all TicketMaster-based events are listed in Eventful.com’s underlying events and venues database (the company was once better known as EVDB.com) and Eventful gets a kickback from any tickets purchases that happened as a result of clicking through the Eventful site (to get to the transaction). Another source of revenue

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July 12th, 2006

Mashup Poster Boy: John Herren

Posted by David Berlind @ 5:14 pm

Categories: General, IT Matters, Mashup Camp, Podcasts, Software Infrastructure

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His is self-deprecating (see the way he has tagged his photo on Flickr). He’s soft-spoken.  And, at any given time, with his long locks hanging over his face, he looks more like he’s about to drop into a pool at the local skateboard park than he would be carving PHP source code out of his computer’s keyboard. Here at Mashup Camp during an after hours party, the first words out of his mouth when we bumped into each other had nothing to do about technology.  Referring to my sytlishly factory-stressed Volcom baseball cap, he said "fun hat."  But make no mistake about it; John Herren is every bit one of the geniuses that’s driving the mashup software culture forward. Not only is he the founder of the popular tagcloud generator Tagcloud.com,  John’s skills so impressed the folks from Zend during last February’s Mashup Camp that now, he’s working for the company.  Here, at Mashup Camp 2, not only is Herren talking about the future of Tagcloud, he’s demonstrating how, with Zend’s new PHP frameworks, the company is taking all of the XML and Javascript drudgery out of developing mashups. 

Now, instead writing upteen lines of code to take advantage of a Flickr or Google Maps API, Zend is making it possible to do the same thing in two lines of code and Herren is here at Mashup Camp wowing developers with demonstrations of how.  Why is this important? Well, if you’re Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, or any one of the hundreds of other API providers on the Internet today, servicing mashup developers and you want your APIs to be readily and easily available to PHP developers, then it makes sense for you to use Zend’s framework to build PHP-based widgets for accessing those same APIs.  Although we didn’t talk much about his involvement with Zend, I caught up with John for a podcast interview during one of the breaks here at camp.  You can download the audio interview, or, if you’re already subscribed to ZDNet’s IT Matters series of interviews, it will be downloaded to your computer or MP3 player automatically.